What We Do

Spoken Syntax Lab Tools

The Spoken Syntax Lab provides resources for collaborative work on
syntax using multiple sources of evidence and modern statistical
models. The Lab is developing repositories of aligned phonetic,
parsed, and contextualized data as well as advanced search and
analysis tools. (Gabriel Recchia)

Dynamics of Higher-Level Grammatical Choices

The dynamics of language can be better
understood through quantitative modeling of higher-level grammatical
choices in spontaneous language use. To study the dynamics of
sentence production, we are using multilevel modeling
techniques from computational statistics combined with methods from
psycholinguistics, corpus linguistics, and natural language processing
to examine two very different kinds of higher-level grammatical
choices. One involves the use of alternative word order structures
conditioned on semantic classes of verbs, such as He brought the
pony to my children, He brought my children the pony, while the
other involves purely `functional' choices such as expressing or omitting
clause-marking words that have no obvious semantic content:
We know (that) it was raining, The story (that) I heard was
different. (Bresnan, Wasow)

Comparative Statistical Models of Varieties of English over
Time and Space

We are investigating whether different dialects or varieties of
language vary in the probabilities of higher-level grammatical choices
over space and time. One project involves phonetico-syntactic
investigations of New Zealand and US English dative constructions in
spontaneous speech over various time-depths (Hay,
Bresnan). Another project involves comparative experimental
and corpus studies of Australian and US English dative syntax and
semantic verb classes (Ford, Bresnan). A third
project studies the origins of African American Vernacular English
(AAVE) by means of quantitative models of selected syntactic
constructions in Caribbean and non-standard English varieties in the
US (Rickford, Wasow). A fourth project studies
Colloquial Singapore English (CSE), aiming to refine the available Lab
tools to streamline the annotation of colloquial varieties of English
such as CSE and AAVE, for subsequent research in (comparative) syntax
and semantics (Fong).

The Semantics of Construction Choice

To study the semantics of construction choice, one project
models the co-occurrence patterns of different sub-classes of
Source/Goal prepositions with different verbs in Optimality Theory
with the aim of understanding the asymmetry in Source vs Goal
expressions (Fong). Another project is testing an
Optimality Theoretic model of variation and ambiguity in English
possessives on both written (Boston University Noun Phrase Corpus) and
spoken (Switchboard) corpora (Anttila, Fong).